Another leader, second only to Chalmers, was Dr. Candlish, much larger
in mind than in body. “Ay,” said an Arran porter to one who was watching
the Doctor, “tak’ a gude look, there’s no muckle o’ him, but there’s a
deal in him!” Lord Cockburn’s words are to the like effect. “It requires
the bright eye and the capacious brow of Candlish to get the better of
the smallness of his person, which makes us sometimes wonder how it
contains its inward fire.” The eager spirit of this divine chafed and
fretted over many matters; his oratory aroused a feeling of sympathetic
indignation in its hearers; afterwards they had some difficulty in
finding adequate cause for their indignation. When the Prince Consort
died his sorrowing widow raised a monument to him on Deeside, whereon a
text from the Apocrypha was inscribed. Candlish declaimed against the
quotation with all the force of his eloquence. “I say this with the
deepest sorrow if it is the Queen who is responsible, I say it with the
deepest indignation whoever else it may be.” These words bring vividly
before us an almost extinct type of thought. And this, again, spoken
eight days before his death and in mortal sickness, has a touch of the
age of Knox: “If you were to set me up in the pulpit I still could make
you all hear on the deafest side of your heads.”
Times again change, the leaders of religious thought in Scotland are
again broad church, if I may use a non-committal term. They have often
moved in advance of their flocks. At a meeting in Professor Blackie’s
house in 1882 a number of Liberal divines were present. Among them Dr.
Macgregor and Dr. Walter C. Smith. They were discussing the personality
of the Evil One in what seemed to an old lady a very rationalistic
spirit. “What,” she said in pious horror, “would you deprive us of the
Devil?”
With this trivial anecdote may go that of another conservative old woman
more than a century earlier. The Rev. David Johnson, who died in 1824,
was minister of North Leith. In his time a new church was built, which
was crowned with a cross wherein lurked, to some, a suggestion of
prelacy if not popery. “But what are we to do?” said the minister to a
knot of objecting pious dames. “Do!” replied one of them, “what wad ye
do, but just put up the auld cock again!” (no doubt the weather-cock).
This cock, or one of its predecessors, crows in history centuries
before. On the 21st March 1567 the Castle of Edinburgh was given in
charge to Cockburn of Skirling. That day there was a great storm which,
among greater feats, blew the tail from the cock on the steeple at
Leith. An ancient prophecy ran the round of the town as miraculously
fulfilled.
“When Skirling sall be capitaine
The Cock sall want his tail.”
Thus the diary of Robert Birrell, at any rate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account